First public school seized by parents set to open

A grand experiment in letting parents seize control of their neighborhood schools is unfolding in an impoverished Mojave Desert town — and lawmakers as far away as Pennsylvania, Florida and Michigan are watching, and pondering the implications for troubled schools in their own states.

Desert Trails Preparatory Academy in Adelanto, Calif., will open for the academic year on Monday as the first school in the nation to have been remade under a law that gives parents the power to take over a low-performing public school and fire the principal, dismiss teachers or bring in private management.

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The law, known as “parent trigger,” passed in California in 2010 and has since been adopted by six other states — Connecticut, Indiana, Louisiana, Mississippi, Ohio and Texas — though parents have not yet taken over schools in any of them.

Parent Revolution, a nonprofit dedicated to organizing trigger campaigns, anticipates a surge of interest in other state legislatures as Desert Trails and three other California schools transformed by parent activism reopen over the next month. Parent empowerment has strong bipartisan support in many states — a sign of the diminished clout of teachers unions, which oppose trigger laws but have not been able to stop their traditional allies in the Democratic Party from endorsing the concept.

In Pennsylvania, for instance, Philadelphia Mayor Michael Nutter and state Sen. Anthony Williams, both Democrats, have led the charge for parent trigger. And on Friday, Democratic Rep. George Miller of California touted the law, and urged other states to adopt it, in a media call with Parent Revolution. On the Republican side, prominent supporters include former Florida Gov. Jeb Bush.

Parent Revolution has been stoking grass-roots support as well. Drawing on $5.5 million in funding from donors including the Walton Family Foundation and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, the group, which has 33 staff members, has been training mom-and-pop activists in states that don’t have trigger laws, including Pennsylvania, Oklahoma, South Carolina and Florida.

“Over the next few weeks, American public education is going to enter a new era of parent power,” said Ben Austin, the group’s executive director.

If so, that new era is likely to be full of fireworks.

Nearly everywhere parents have organized under the empowerment law in California, acrimony and outrage have followed.

The first attempt at a takeover, at a school in Compton, Calif., failed after a prolonged court battle. Elsewhere, parents have split into dissenting factions, circulated dueling petitions, filed lawsuits, turned school board meetings into political rallies and publicly called rival parents liars and thugs. Vulgar graffiti has been scrawled on school property. Teachers have demanded reassignment. Moms have yanked their children out of neighborhood schools where they no longer feel welcome.

“Our school was stolen from us,” said Chrissy Alvarado, who opposed the parental coup at Desert Trails and will be homeschooling her two children this year.

Taking control requires signatures from a majority of parents. But a much smaller group of committed activists inevitably ends up deciding the future of the school. Just 53 parents at Desert Trails, a school of about 600 kids, made the final call to turn the building — and the public funds to run it — over to a nonprofit group that runs a charter school in a nearby town. (That charter school gets excellent results, but serves far fewer poor, disabled and non-English speaking students than Desert Trails, state data show.)